C30 More Zonal Clippings

A few weeks ago, in C30 Zonal Clippings (January 2022), I created a couple of stub pages to document the zonals for the current cycle. I ended the post saying,

The next step, of course, will be to flesh out the two stubs. I hope to tackle both at the same time.

Of course, of course, that was too ambitious. The clippings that I added to the primary page, Zonals 2020-2021, (C30; m-w.com), documented several events that had more complicated structures than zonals in past cycles. These were multi-stage hybrid events held online to decide qualifying players from continental federations. Will this online trend continue into the next cycle (C31)? We'll find out next year.

Worth mentioning is a blow-by-blow account by the Chessexpress blog of the event for zone 3.6. We first saw this blog two years ago in C29 Zonal Qualification Paths (December 2019). Here are the relevant posts:-

• 2021-03-04: 2021 Oceania Zonal • 'The 2021 Oceania Zonal is now going ahead as a "hybrid" event. This means that the players will be playing online, but supervised by an in place arbiter.'
• 2021-03-21: 2021 Oceania Zonal - Day 1
• 2021-03-22: On hybrid chess
• 2021-03-27: 2021 Oceania Zonal - Day 3
• 2021-03-28: Oceania Zonal - Final Day

Next step: tackle the page Zonal Qualifiers 2020-2021 (C30; m-w.com). Given the increase in the number of players, this also promises to be more complicated then previous pages of the same type.